July 2, 2024
Sylvain Kerkour writes:
Rust adoption is stagnating not because it’s missing some feature pushed by programming language theory enthusiasts, but because of a lack of focus on solving the practical problems that developers are facing every day.
… no company outside of AWS is making SDKs for Rust … it has no official HTTP library.
As a result of Rust’s lack of official packages, even its core infrastructure components need to import hundreds of third-party crates.
cargo imports over 400 crates.
crates.io has over 500 transitive dependencies.
…the offical libsignal (from the Signal messaging app) uses 500 third-party packages.
… what is really inside these packages. It has been found last month that among the 999 most popular packages on crates.io, the content of around 20% of these doesn’t even match the content of their Git repository.
…how I would do it (there may be better ways):
A stdx (for std eXtended) under the rust-lang organization containing the most-needed packages. … to make it secure: all packages in stdx can only import packages from std or stdx. No third-party imports. No supply-chain risks.
[stdx packages to include, among others]:
gzip, hex, http, json, net, rand
Read Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem
Submitter’s note:
I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.
Developers should think about what libraries they trust, but it seems that most of the time they’ll choose whatever is most convenient for handling the immediate problems they’re working to solve.
Funnily enough the same is true for languages that have huge standard libraries. They put anything that is convenient to solve their immediate problem in there. That is how languages like Python end up with multiple of just about everything complicated in there.